There are essential services to support communications during disaster situations. To help alleviate highly congested network environments during these situations, it is beneficial to have a mechanism to allow and/or prevent new access attempts from particular operator-defined applications of wireless devices, which may also be referred to as user equipments (UEs). Such mechanisms may be subject to regional regulations.
There may be certain service requirements for Application Specific Congestion Control (ACDC). For example, a service requirement may be that the home network shall be able to configure a wireless device with at least four ACDC categories. Each operator-identified application may then be associated with a selected one of the ACDC categories. Another service requirement may stipulate that the serving network is able to broadcast, in one or more areas of the RAN, control information. The wireless device is then able to control whether or not an access attempt for a certain application is allowed, based on this broadcast barring information and the configuration of ACDC categories in the wireless device.
The ACDC category is defined such that applications for which use is expected to be restricted the least are assigned the highest ACDC category. Applications for which use is expected to be restricted more than applications in the highest category are assigned the second-to-highest ACDC category, and so on. Applications whose use is expected to be the most restricted are either assigned the lowest ACDC category or not any category at all.
Conventionally, the access barring scheme is either based on the BarringFactor and BarringTime, as in LTE Access Class Barring (ACB), or on the barred/not barred flag per UE Access Class between 0 and 9, as in Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) ACB. Each wireless device is associated with an Access Class (AC) between 0 and 9. The AC should be randomly allocated to each wireless device such that the population of each AC is equal.
In LTE ACB, access to RAN by a wireless device is controlled by ac-BarringFactor and ac-BarringTime. Regardless of the UE AC, the wireless device must generate a random number that is lower than the threshold ac-BarringFactor in order to access the network. If this mechanism is used for ACDC and for each category, there may be increased overhead in the SIB message size. In UTRAN ACB, each UE AC is assigned a barred/not barred flag,
It is recognized that there may be a very large number of ACDC categories. For example, it is anticipated that there may be 256 or more ACDC categories in the future. Providing barring information for a large number of ACDC categories results in substantial SIB message overhead which may not fulfill ACDC service requirements. Additionally, the barring information may be broadcasted per PLMN in a RAN sharing scenario. Thus, where there are six PLMNs active at the same time for a single eNB, the barring information may be broadcasted six times.